''And are you then that Virgil and that fountain of purest speech? Glory and light of poets!'' --Dante

Lately, I've been experimenting with writing and reading only poetry. I've been thinking a lot about poetry and how it's in this third space between prose and our every day language. It's the inner workings of ourselves and thoughts and observations. To me, the best poetry is a definition that's slightly off center with what we know of language, slightly outside of this space and time. I want words to be my medium. What is the role of the poet as a translator? All writers are translators, picking apart patterns and translating them into something both universal and specific, just like what we want from words. We use words to hack away at the meat because we are constantly searching for a word to get us closer to the marrow of meaning. It's a privilege to have a collection of languages and words to best describe a moment, because the hope of each word is that it will explain us somehow. Words make this other landscape, partially what we've created and what we inherit.....

thoughts of a second year french student

I'm at a point in learning French that I can start to explore a bit and my learning is less frantic, more assured. I have some confidence in my understanding and my speaking. I've built a basic foundation, so now I can start to  realize the architecture of the language. Now I get to find joy, to be rewarded instead of trying to write down every phrase I've learned, like my memory was only built upon what  I could record. I'm developing a hard won instinct for the language and a faith that it's sturdy enough for me to roam without getting lost.

Freewrite on Anne Sexton

I am closed up inside of a library of closed up books with words stamped orderly onto pages and elderly, browning FLORES MEMORIAL LIBRARY cards clinging to back covers like the afterthought of a tongue added to a human face. It is in the fall after my fifteenth birthday. And I am about to fall hard for the poetry of Anne Sexton.
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I found 'Transformations' first. On choosing it, I am attracted to the title. The back cover tells me: Beware! Keep out of reach of children! These poem-stories are a strange reenactment of seventeen Grimm fairy tales. What is most astonishing about these transformations is that they end up being as wholly personal as Anne Sexton's most intimate poems, coming curiously, for all their story sound, from as deep a place.

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This happens upstairs. On the first floor my friend and I make room from between our biology and algebra textbooks. Their weight is a dead weight. 'Transformations' bleeds, gravitates, yearns, cuts, crawls. It falls on the table and our textbooks pale, smelling too new, their teachings abstract. 'Transformations' has been sleeping on a shelf like a spell, waiting for me to turn fifteen and need it like nothing else.


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 My friend and I read 'Snow White', alternation, taking turns and hopscotching, reading lines aloud.

"Pride pumped in her like poison"

"Snow White walked in the wildwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
his tongue lolling out like a worm.
The birds called out lewdly,
talking like pink parrots,
and snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for her sweet white neck"
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I find out that Anne Sexton is a painful type of perfectionist. Her editors could barely understand her handwriting. She would tangle herself up in her words. She would rework each poem until it was red with her pestering, changing a word or a line even as her manuscript was in its final stages of publication. She is the searching type.
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Now her stanzas are making barriers in my head and I'm peaking around them to look out. Her poetry is a thing film rolled up and playing under my eyelids, her words rattle my rib cage. I frame bits of my life, my understanding, by quoting her. That night I go home and read her in bed and the next day  I catch a cold so that  I am allowed to sit still and read her some more.

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I love fairy tales, old worlds translated by time and survived by language. I love her retellings.

I get home to my room and my bookshelf and look up Anne Sexton's name in the index of a literature textbook.
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I find out that she killed herself at 45. I put her in past tense. I feel history moving through a train and the history of her life in dates progressing towards me. I am hit as this runs a worm hole through my intestines.

I feel the tiny bit shattered.

There are places where time is getting under our feet and splicing through the sidewalk. Where years ring and echo loosely off of the earth and twist themselves into a new shapes like foreign languages, they create a landscape of heres and nows and thens.

here is some poetry

I wish I had a sound for you
but would a word give understanding to your meaning?

I believe that a word for you would exist in a language
from a town where bright paint is let loose so slickly upon rooftops that color seems to jump and slide off of tile and unto tongues.